Penelope Lively’s Anatomy of a Mugging

A retired schoolteacher, Charlotte Rainsford, has been mugged on a London street. Her hip has been broken and her bag stolen by someone who, Penelope Lively briskly informs us, will disappear from the rest of Charlotte’s story. Amid the initial shock and chaos, it is Lively who deftly takes control of “How It All Began,” using the aftereffects of this casual nastiness — which sends Charlotte to her daughter’s house while she recuperates, disrupting many of the characters’ routines — to trace the relationships among an assortment of relatives, employers, students and illicit lovers. Seven lives are sometimes amusingly “derailed,” as Lively puts it, by Charlotte’s injury.

Since the mid-1970s, Lively has been folding philosophical contemplation into the psychological analysis of her characters, melding the novel of ideas with the droll novel of manners. This signature approach has won her a Booker Prize (in 1987) and a general’s worth of honorary badges and medals, including the O.B.E., the C.B.E. and membership in the Royal Society of Literature. Lively’s gift is for delving into the roiling uncertainty beneath our seemingly mundane choices and for rendering the consequences of those choices in crisp yet subtle terms. She extends our ways of trying to comprehend, if not to answer, life’s big questions.

Chief among the seven derailed lives in “How It All Began” is that of Charlotte’s wistfully likable daughter, Rose, who has settled into a comfortably boring marriage and an even more boring job “assisting” an elderly aristocrat still wealthy enough to afford a career as an independent scholar of 18th-century politics. Lord Henry Peters is one of Lively’s triumphs, a delightfully pathetic antihero. Even as he struggles with his fading memory, he clings to his vanity, believing that any words he puts to paper — or, in a later aspiration, intones on film — must automatically compel the nation’s attention. Meanwhile, it’s clear that the nation will be more or less indifferent.

Lord Henry has a niece, Marion, a bit less self-centered but not entirely lacking the family trait. A high-end interior designer suffering from the effects of the economic crisis (a fate she shares with her adulterous lover, who specializes in architectural salvage), she tries to make the most of a chance meeting with a financier who promises to hire her for a major renovation. She also sends a text message that her lover’s wife intercepts. Both Marion and the rather smarmy gentleman in question had hoped to remain detached emotionally, but they continue their affair out of a sort of duty to infidelity, even as he tries to win back his wife.

In some ways the most interesting derailment involves a middle-aged recent immigrant named Anton, whom Charlotte is tutoring in English. As she does so, Charlotte reflects on the fact that her own life is a narrative, with a chain of events leading to sudden twists (like the mugging), inexplicable interludes of happiness (“like sudden bursts of sunlight”) and the inevitable tendency toward closure, a concept for which she has little liking. She reads novels and even trashy magazines as a way of easing herself through physical and mental stress, frustrated when she loses the ability to follow the complicated prose of old favorites like Henry James. All her life, “reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. . . . She has read in a state of primal innocence. . . . She has read to find out what it is that other people experience that she is missing.” In her way, Charlotte is a narratologist, a person for whom plot is a search for meaning and an ending is a final answer, whether one likes that answer or not.

It might behoove Lively’s other characters to read a bit more. Intercut with Charlotte’s story and given equal time, these other lives are full of mistakes, plagued by narcissism and frustration. But that doesn’t make us any less eager to read about the interior designer’s halfhearted affair, Lord Henry’s ridiculous but often benevolent pomposity, Rose’s touching obliviousness to her own developing affair of the heart. All these lives are concerned with studying or pillaging or altering the past, living up to hopes and promises conceived long ago — and striving for a pleasant future in which that past might be reinvented or at least understood.

ny devoted reader will agree with Charlotte that narrative can be both a burden and a palliative, perhaps one of the greatest. To help Anton, she departs from the unimaginative standard E.S.L. lessons (“I sit on the chair”) by giving him children’s stories instead, convinced that a story line will pull him through language and into his adopted country. In this way, she also draws him into her daughter’s life as Rose and Anton begin to chat, exchange vernacular expressions and go on simple shopping expeditions, finding a commonality that’s lacking in Rose’s marriage to her dull, inoffensive, cat-loving husband. Reading, Anton feels a childlike joy, “that extraordinary realization that all those black marks on the page could speak.” For him, learning to read in another language is like learning to love again, even at 45.

Ah, age. One of the most daring aspects of this novel is that Lively is concerned with the hearts and problems of older characters. Her major players are well past their youth, and a boyish up-and-coming historian (the snake in Lord Henry’s mansion) doesn’t become important until much of the novel has passed. “How much remains when youth is gone?” Lively seems to be asking. And the answer is, “An abundance.” Here middle and old age are times of blossoming identity and possibility, miraculous bursts of sunshine.

How it ends (this time): One of our most talented writers has written an elegant, witty work of fiction, deceptively simple, emotionally and intellectually penetrating, the kind of novel that brings a plot to satisfying closure but whose questions linger long afterward in the reader’s mind.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

By Penelope Lively

229 pp. Viking. $26.95.

Susann Cokal, the author of two novels, is director of the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

A version of this review appears in print on January 1, 2012, on page BR7 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Unintended Consequences. Today's Paper|Subscribe